Chapter 23 – Academy (9)
That night, I dreamed of a whiteboard instead of swords.
Markers squeaked under my hand as I wrote, the smell of cheap ink and old air-conditioning heavier than any mana field.
E = mc²
∆E = hν
Maxwell's equations sketched on the side, four familiar lines wrapping the whole board like a frame.
"Alright, that's enough for today," I heard myself say — not as Erynd, but as *Eren*. My voice older, a little hoarse from too many lectures, English overlaid with the cadence of Hindi that never quite left. "Read chapter six before next week. And I mean actually read it, not ask Chat for the summary two hours before the exam."
A few students laughed. Chairs scraped. Backpacks rustled.
The classroom was a typical Indian university lecture hall — too many seats, too few fans, paint peeling a little near the ceiling. Someone was eating something that smelled like samosas in the back row. It was evening; the windows showed a sky turning dark over the campus.
I turned back to the board.
Mana… I'd written the word there, in the corner.
Back then, it had just been a joke. A placeholder.
But the more I stared at my neat, real-world equations, the more it had bothered me. All our fields, all our forces, everything supposed to be there, and yet every time we poked at certain gaps in data it felt like something was missing — like there was another term nobody had written down yet.
I uncapped a different marker.
"If we postulate an extra field," I murmured to myself, writing M(x,t) in the corner, "coupled to matter but weakly coupled to electromagnetism…"
Something nagged. Something *important*.
New constants. New energy levels around atoms. A way to store potential without changing charge.
A link.
Mana, if it existed, wouldn't be magic. It would be just another field. Another layer on top of what we'd already mapped. And if it interacted with electrons—
The door slammed open.
I froze, marker halfway to the board.
A man stood there. I couldn't see his face clearly. Just a dark jacket, shaking hands, a gun.
Students screamed.
"Down!" someone shouted.
Time slowed.
The muzzle flashed.
For a stupid split-second, my mind did not think about my students, or my life, or the fact that I was about to die on a perfectly normal day after reminding people to read chapter six.
It thought about the equations.
About a fifth field folding through the others. About a way energy could drop into it and not come back. About atoms whose outer electrons had extra, invisible shelves nobody had labelled yet.
About mana orbitals.
The bullet hit.
Pain exploded through my chest.
I dropped to my knees, marker rolling from my fingers. The board swam in front of my eyes, letters blurring.
Just before everything turned black, I had the shape of it.
Mana as a secondary binding energy for atomic states. A way to store and move power without obeying our usual rules. A bridge between electromagnetism and something else.
If I'd had five minutes, I could have written it down.
I had five seconds.
Then —
— I was falling again. Not in a lecture hall this time, but through that familiar, endless dark, toward a world with swords, crowns, and a System that loved giving me quests I hadn't asked for.
The nightmare shattered.
***
I woke with my heart hammering and my shirt sticking to my back.
Light was already bleeding in around the edges of the curtains. Birds — the local equivalent, anyway — were making a racket outside. From the corridor, I could hear other first-years moving around, clattering with books and half-awake conversation.
I stared at the ceiling for a moment, trying to separate the memory from the dream.
Eren.
India.
The university. The cheap fans. The whiteboard.
And the gun.
"…Right," I muttered.
I sat up and rubbed my face.
"Morning," Rion's voice drifted from the other bed. "You look like someone used your head for target practice."
"Accurate," I said before thinking.
He blinked, then shrugged halfway through pulling on his uniform jacket.
"Rough night?" he asked.
"Nightmare," I said. "Old life."
He nodded as if that made perfect sense.
"Must be nice," he muttered. "I only dream about homework." He yawned. "Hurry up. If we're late to morning class again, Professor Garen will make us run laps *before* the practical."
That got me moving.
By the time we reached the lecture hall, the sun was fully up. The Academy's main building loomed over us, all stone and banners and the faint hum of enchantments built into the walls.
Today's first class was one of the dull ones.
"Common Knowledge: Natural Philosophy and Mana I."
In other words: medieval physics with mana sprinkled on top.
We took our seats near the middle. The teacher — an older man with thinning hair and the tired eyes of someone who had graded too many essays in his life — stood at the front beside a slate board, chalk in hand.
"Today," he began, "we review the standard model of mana flow. Please write this down. It will appear on your exams."
Chalk scratched against slate.
[ Mana Cycle ]
Ambient mana in the environment. Absorption through the core. Circulation through the mana channels. Emission via spell technique.
Around me, quills scratched as students took notes.
I stared at the words.
Standard model.
He explained the basics — how mana "naturally flows from high-density areas to low-density ones," how "cores compress it like a spring," how "spells release stored mana by shaping it with intent."
It wasn't *wrong*.
It was just… incomplete.
I tuned out the familiar explanation and let my thoughts drift.
Back to chalkboards.
Back to India.
Back to Eren, who had stayed late most nights, reviewing data from experiments and grumbling about funding cuts, but who had still loved standing in front of a room full of young people and trying to make the world make sense.
I remembered early mornings with textbooks and late evenings with coffee. Theses defended, exams written, students crying in my office about grades or family problems. Life had been messy and tiring and full.
And I'd died with a half-finished equation in my head.
Now I sat in a stone hall in another world, listening to a man explain mana in four bullet points.
"—mana, as we all know, does not interact with mundane forces such as lightning or magnetism except in special circumstances," the teacher was saying. "Therefore, it is best understood as its own, separate phenomenon."
I frowned.
Separate phenomenon.
But I remembered the feeling in the nightmare — that moment just before the bullet hit, when I'd seen mana not as some isolated magic but as an extra field woven through the others.
Not separate.
Layered.
"Milton."
I blinked.
The teacher was looking at me.
"Is there a problem?" he asked.
A few students turned to stare. Tamara, from two rows over, raised an eyebrow.
"…No, sir," I said. "Just thinking."
"Think faster and write slower," he grumbled. "You still need the notes even if you already know them."
The class laughed.
I dipped my head and pretended to pay attention, quill moving over parchment. The words I wrote were the ones he said.
The ones I *thought* were different.
If mana gradients acted like voltage…
If mana flow acted like current…
Then cores would be batteries, channels would be wires, spells would be complex circuits. Sword aura would be a shaped field hugging steel. Elemental magic would be coupling mana flow to different forces — heat, momentum, electromagnetic fields.
Lightning magic already looked suspiciously like someone throwing a high-energy discharge across a mana-shaped path.
The more I thought about it, the more it bothered me.
We were sitting on a unified theory of magic and physics, and everyone was content with four bullet points.
By the time class ended, my head hurt in a different way than when Garen made us run.
The afternoon passed in a blur of training and basic drills.
My body went through familiar motions — stepping, swinging, adjusting my stance — but my mind kept drifting back to Earth. To Eren. To the whiteboard.
To the shot.
To that single, unfinished idea: mana orbitals around atoms, extra shelves of energy nobody in my old world had been able to measure.
If that was true, then mana-rich matter in this world would behave differently at a fundamental level. It would charge and discharge differently. It would respond to fields differently.
Which meant I should be able to test it.
***
That night, I didn't go straight to sleep.
Rion snored softly from his bed.
The dorm was quiet. Outside, the Academy grounds were mostly dark, lit only by a few mana lamps along the main paths.
I sat at my small desk, a single candle burning low, and spread out what I had: a few thin iron nails (borrowed from a repair kit), some copper wire (pried from a broken training charm), a dull knife, a bowl of water, and a flat mana crystal about the size of my thumb.
Not a modern lab.
But then, Eren hadn't had magic.
I did.
"Alright," I muttered. "Let's see how much you remember, professor."
First step: make a coil.
I wrapped the copper wire around one of the nails, turning it slowly until I had a tight spiral. Crude, but passable. I peeled the ends of the wire back so both tips stuck out.
If this were Earth, I'd connect the ends to a battery and see if I could make a simple electromagnet.
Here, I had a mana crystal.
I held it between my fingers, closed my eyes, and reached inward.
Most people pulled mana through their core and out again without thinking much past "flow in, flow out." Staff campus spent time on shaping that flow, on patterns and incantations.
I had a body that had thrown lightning bolts with technology and a mind that had once lectured about current density.
So I treated mana like charge.
I pictured my core as a reservoir, the channels as wires, the crystal as a capacitor already half-filled with potential. I pushed mana into the crystal until it hummed faintly in my hand, then imagined a path from my core, through my arm, into one end of the copper wire, around the nail, and back into myself through the other end.
A loop.
Like a circuit.
Mana moved.
Slow at first. Awkward.
Then smoother, as if my body recognized what I was trying to do and adjusted.
The crystal warmed.
I opened my eyes.
The candle flame beside me was quivering slightly, reacting to air currents. That made it hard to see small effects.
I carefully brought the tip of another nail close to the coiled one.
Nothing.
I frowned.
"Too weak," I guessed.
On Earth, current strength mattered. Here, mana density did too. I increased the flow, carefully — more mana through my channels, more into the wire, more around the nail.
A faint tingle crawled up my arm.
The crystal in my hand pulsed.
The loose nail trembled.
Very slightly.
I grinned.
"There you are."
It wasn't much. The pull was weak, barely enough to nudge the second nail. If I hadn't been watching for it, I might have missed it.
But it was there.
Mana flow through a coil around an iron core had created a magnetic field.
Electromagnetism cared about mana if you pushed hard enough and shaped it properly.
Which meant lightning mages weren't just throwing raw magic; they were likely forcing mana to accelerate charges along paths their spells dictated, tying the two fields together.
I let the flow drop.
The tingling faded. The crystal cooled.
"…So, you really are just another field," I murmured. "Hiding where nobody bothers to look."
I reached for a scrap of parchment and started to write.
Mana potential difference = ∆Φₘ
Current = Iₘ (mana flow per channel)
Field around conductors ∝ Iₘ, modified by coupling constant k between mana and charge.
The equations weren't precise — I didn't have numbers — but they didn't need to be. Not yet. All I needed was a map.
The next step would be to find out whether manipulating mana flow could *induce* currents in mundane materials without direct contact. If I pulsed mana in the channels of my own body, could I create weak electric fields around my skin? Could I, with enough refinement, interfere with other people's spells by pulling at the electrons in their catalysts?
Could I build a spell that was basically a transformer?
The possibilities made my head buzz.
[ System ]
[ Hidden Condition Met ]
[ New Title Unlocked: "Frustrated Physicist" – (Minor INT growth when trying to force magic to obey science.) ]
I stared at the translucent text hovering over my desk.
"…You're mocking me," I whispered.
Another line appeared.
[ New Sub-Quest: "Mana Circuit Theory" ]
– Objective: Demonstrate a reproducible interaction between mana flow and mundane electromagnetism.
– Reward: Unknown. (Depends on results.)
I pinched the bridge of my nose.
"Of course."
For a while longer, I scribbled diagrams — loops, coils, rough models of mana channels running alongside blood vessels, notes about how aura hugged steel like a field wrapping a conductor.
Somewhere in between, I realized I was smiling.
In my old life, every time I'd tried to push at the edge of what we knew, I'd run into the limit of our tools. Now, I had fewer tools.
But I had mana.
And a second chance.
Eventually, the candle burned low enough that it guttered. The dorm room slipped into darkness, broken only by a faint, lingering afterimage of the System window.
My arm ached from channeling mana. My core felt a little hollowed, reminding me there were still consequences in this world for pushing too hard.
I set the crude electromagnet down, blew out a breath, and leaned back.
Outside, the Academy slept.
Inside, a twelve-year-old boy with a past life and a head full of equations plotted how to bully magic and science into shaking hands.
If I was right about mana and atoms…
If I could really link the two…
Then maybe, just maybe, there was something I could achieve here that Eren never had time to finish.
And this time, I'd write it down before anyone had a chance to shoot me.